Leading animal welfare and conservation nonprofit, Born Free USA, has today released a new report exploring the abuse of wild animals on social media titled, Their Lives for Your Likes: The Exploitation of Wild Animals on Social Media.
Social media is replete with videos and other content featuring captive wild animals forced into close proximity to humans, placed in unnatural settings, and made to act contrary to their natural instincts and behaviors. While this content might seem cute and funny on the surface, it is extremely harmful to both the individual animals and to species as a whole.
Social media content that exploits wild animals drives the demand for wild animals as pets. This, in turn, fuels species population declines in the wild; perpetuates animal cruelty and abuse; creates public safety hazards including deadly escapes, attacks, and disease spread; and can endanger the ecosystems where these non-native wild animals are kept as pets, as exotic animal releases or escapes are quite common. Without proper controls, social media outlets provide an arena that functions almost like a virtual circus or roadside zoo; often depicting animals in inappropriate conditions that significantly compromise their individual welfare.
To better understand the nature of the most influential social media content featuring wild animals currently circulating, Born Free USA analyzed 50 YouTube videos of five of some of the most popular exotic pets in the United States in 2022: pythons, wolf-dogs, tigers, marmosets, and grey parrots.
Main findings are as follows:
- Videos depicting exotic pets comprised most of the total dataset at 64.6% of the sample, with marmosets demonstrating the highest number of pet videos at 90% of all videos within that animal category.
- Eighty-one percent (81%) of all videos showed dangerous direct physical interaction with a human, including in 90% of all tiger videos.
- The high frequency of human/animal interaction in the videos suggests that viewers may incorrectly perceive these wild animals as domesticated or “tame,” and thus safe to interact with, thereby enhancing the desirability and normalization of exotic pets.
- “Likes” substantially outnumbered the “Dislikes” on every video in the dataset, suggesting that viewers mostly perceived this harmful content positively.
- Several videos that portrayed exotic pets linked to an exotic animal distributor or breeder, which also functions to increase the demand for the exotic pet trade and to facilitate such purchases.
The report calls on social media users to assume responsibility to learn about the exploitative nature of this animal content and how to appropriately respond to it, as every view, click, comment, share, and reaction perpetuates harm to animals. By lessening the viral spread of this content, Born Free USA also aims to decrease the demand for exotic animals in the private trade; reduce the number of animals entering this trade; improve individual animal welfare; and protect public health and safety by reducing occurrences of zoonotic disease spread and deadly escapes or attacks.
Angela Grimes, Born Free USA CEO, says, “Social media is a wonderful tool for education and entertainment, but sadly it is also a medium for animal abuse. Exploitative animal content is spread far and wide online, mostly by well-meaning people who probably do not realize how harmful it is. Social media users hold a lot of power when it comes to what content goes viral and gets amplified online. With this report, we aim to raise awareness of the harm certain wild animal content can cause and empower individual social media users to help decrease the impact of harmful portrayals of wild animals.”
